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“It’s frustrating and — to be honest with you — it’s hard to understand,” Schultz said of the lack of bipartisan movement on higher education issues during a sit-down with POLITICO. He mentioned last week’s vote that stalled progress on Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s student loan refinancing bill as an example. “Forty million students [in debt]. What on God’s earth is preventing congressional leaders from looking at that objectively?”

The new Starbucks College Achievement Plan has been met with much fanfare since its introduction, from a New York City kick-off with Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Monday, to a celebratory event Wednesday at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters in Washington.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will respond, but ASU President Michael Crow described a recent breakfast with 18 members of Congress, including the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“I outlined for them what we’ve done and what we have achieved and they’re sort of like, ‘Well, how come this isn’t going on everywhere? Why can’t we get more innovation, more change, and so forth?’ ” Crow said. “And I said, ‘It’s largely because we live in a higher education system which is driven — as Howard suggested — by swimming in your lane and trying to catch the swimmer that is slightly ahead of you.’ ”

The partnership between Starbucks and ASU will provide full tuition reimbursement for any of the company’s 135,000 U.S. employees enrolled as juniors and seniors, each time they complete 21 credit hours. While the up-front costs could be problematic for some students, Starbucks says the 21-credit system is an incentive for completion.

ASU-funded scholarships will also help cover the cost. Juniors and seniors can get about $2,240 per 12-credit course load — undergraduate online programs cost between $480 and $543 per credit hour — and freshmen and sophomores can get $1,267 total.

Employees also will be required to work at least 20 hours a week to keep eligibility for the program, but Crow said ASU has many systems already in place to aid in student persistence. ASU will also accept transfer credits from employees, and provide coaching and academic advising.

ASU doesn’t boast the most online programs, with about 40 to choose from. But Schultz said that after speaking to “a lot of universities,” it was online education’s “seamless integration” that made ASU the right pick.

ASU spokesman Phil Regier said the university expects “somewhere between” 4,000 and 15,000 new students in the program’s first year, and 15,000 to 20,000 on a continuing basis. But capacity should not be an issue, Regier and Crow said.

“We have been preparing for the new students for months,” Regier said in an email. “The online learning infrastructure is designed for scale and can handle a higher demand than currently exists, and we will proactively build out our infrastructure to meet future demand if it exceeds capacity.”

The plan goes far beyond what most businesses offer through tuition assistance programs. But critics quickly pointed out that this one has its own pitfalls and can’t solve an underlying problem: that tuition prices are just too high.

“There is a sort of classic market failure with this type of arrangement — the reason why we still live in a world where the individual and governments are responsible for financing education,” said Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Project at the New America Foundation. “The goal is to not pay for someone’s education, and then poach everyone’s employees who have been trained by someone else.”

Three out of four Starbucks employees lack a college degree, and the company isn’t requiring — or even necessarily expecting — them to keep working there once they graduate.

“If some choose a different path, this is their education to keep,” Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson said in an email. “Being part of our company’s unique mission, values and culture is a big part of what initially attracts and ultimately keeps our [employees] inspired to stay with us, and we are hopeful that this benefit will only strengthen our partners’ pride in working for Starbucks.”